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The Wind Will Carry Us

A still from the film The wind will carry us. The image is of a yellow field landscape with hills at the background and a motor bike in the centre
By anvita walia Climate Change and Sexuality Voices September 18, 2025

In Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us, there are scenes where time stands still, where the ebb and flow of life is witnessed in moments often overlooked: a child’s cry, a woman’s wait, a rustle of wind through empty streets, the trees, the trees. Drawing from a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad, its title captures a simple, profound truth: we are all carried by forces beyond us, plucked from the places we thought were permanent.

The film moves slowly. It encourages us to pay attention to the present moment, the murmurs of everyday life, the spaces in between, rather than rushing toward what comes next. This invitation to inhabit uncertainty and transition feels especially urgent in the wake of climate change, when the foundations of our world shift beneath our feet.

This essay picks up that invitation. It explores how, within systems that seek to contain us, something always flows beyond their reach. It asks: what changes if we shift our gaze from what is slipping away to what is taking root?

The Unspoken Rules of Power

Our bodies hold truths we cannot always see. Living in the space between instinct and choice, these truths often find revelation in our sexuality. How we recognise (or deny) them is shaped by the ideas we learn from the world around us. From the moment we are born, we are told who we may touch and who we may not, which bodies evoke desire and which provoke shame, what counts as intimacy and what must be cast as perversion. These ideas are cultivated in us slowly, covertly, until we come to believe them as our singular truth. They form the lens through which we see ourselves and each other. When left unquestioned, this version of the truth crystallises into certainty.

This is how we become complicit in our own surveillance. Power rarely manifests as a spectacular display of coercion. It is woven into daily routines of work, domestic lives, even intimate relations, aligning our individual practices with broader expectations of social and economic order by tethering these practices to the health of the population, the strength of the workforce, and the imagined future of the nation. The real force of this power lies in how it determines legitimacy, folded into the language of health and care: welfare, aid, diagnosis, insurance, family planning. It stratifies our lives by embedding hierarchies of value into our most private experiences and carrying them into the most public institutions. A birth certificate, a census category, an employment contract, a marriage license: all of these become instruments for deciding which lives are registered as respectable, as worthy of reproduction. The violence of this arrangement lies in its normalisation.

And it is this matrix of governance – so unrelenting, so seemingly ordinary – that is being redrawn as the climate crisis reshapes the conditions of life.

The Unbearable Weight of Becoming

From the moment we are born, our bodies are already claimed by history. This inheritance binds us, delimiting what we can do, desire, become. Like how women from marginalised castes have long borne the paradox of being hyper-sexualised, even as they are pushed outside the sphere of permissible sexuality. They are relegated to stigmatised occupations – manual scavenging, domestic labour, leatherwork, sex work – that our society depends on but simultaneously devalues. Their bodies are rendered hyper-visible and invisible at once.

Such divisions are only intensified under climate strain. In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Aravanis, an intersex and trans community in Tamil Nadu, were unrecorded in official data, denied compensation, and left without livelihood support. This systematic erasure shows how marginalised bodies are excluded from the most basic recognition of their right to life and dignity, both in times of acute crisis and in the enduring aftermath of climate change. The precision of such exclusion is sharpened by norms of sexuality. Here again, we observe the recurrence of dichotomies. In their youth, the Aravanis are pushed into precarious and often exploitative labour, such as dancing or sex work. As they age, their bodies are deemed post-sexual, discarded by the state, denied pensions, forced to beg. In our world, all bodies characterised as ‘unproductive,’ like aging bodies – or disabled and ill bodies, or fat bodies, or unemployed bodies, or homeless bodies, or incarcerated bodies – are desexualised, disdained, even considered disposable for what they represent: an interruption to the flow of normative time and value.

In the body politic, disposability is coded into climate change itself. The political engineering of such disposability reveals a vicious cycle: as neoliberal governance erodes social protections, entire populations are not only rendered expendable amid ecological crises, but become active sites of intensified vulnerability. Here, climate change becomes both a consequence and a catalyst of injustice, such that those bodies deemed ‘surplus’ under the regimes of capital and health are rendered disposable. Disgust operates as affective munition, legitimising disposability by framing surplus bodies as burdens to futurity: unproductive, unsexy, and unfit for survival. Desexualisation becomes a mode of ‘letting die,’ a withdrawal of the conditions necessary for life. Meanwhile, bodies that are hyper-visible and hyper-exploited bear fatigue, illness, and bodily strain as the corporeal cost of survival, channelled into work that secures futures for others, while foreclosing their own.

In this way, some bodies carry the impossible weight of survival, while others are quietly written out of it.

The Unyielding Economy of Excess

Scarcity frames survival as a zero-sum game: if some are to survive, some must be sacrificed. Climate discourse is steeped in this logic: from overpopulation anxieties, to aid that divides ‘vulnerable’ from ‘resilient,’ to triage plans that discreetly erase certain bodies. But scarcity is not a fixed condition, it is manufactured through unequal resource distribution, exploitative labour regimes, monopolised climate expertise. And who gets to survive is inseparable from who is deemed healthy, attractive, productive, and sexually normative.

Yet, sexuality is not reducible to these norms. It unfolds in how people stumble into desire, make meaning of their bodies, invent languages of affinity, betray the scripts written for them. In that betrayal lies a different kind of power. That which refuses confinement, even when it cannot fully escape it. This marks the emergence of the erotic. Eros has long been named as a force that moves between bodies and within them, a drive toward creation, intimacy, even rupture. Where sexuality is organised by the systems that govern it, the erotic leaks beyond the realm of regulation. It is felt in the heat of protest, in the tenderness of caregiving, in the irrepressible urge to dance, laugh, fight, cook, create, touch. It is the excess that no crisis can erase. An excess that unsettles the neat categories that systems of domination work so hard to naturalise: productive/unproductive, hypersexualised/desexualised, exploitable/expired, respectable/shameful, deserving/disposable, future-bearing/future-threatening.

Bataille called this expenditure: the surplus of life that breaks free of utility, that dares to waste itself. This wasteful and irrecuperable expenditure can either be a conscious, glorious squandering or a destructive, catastrophic outpouring. It is dangerous because it reveals how fragile the rules of order really are. The erotic spills out in gestures that governance cannot fully code: when a river bursts its banks in rage, when forests naturally heal after wildfire, when overworked women pause to braid each other’s hair. It is witnessed when disabled women in Washim insist that they are capable of taking charge of the climate crisis, if only given the opportunity. It is discovered in cities like Bhuj and Bhopal, where what often gets described as ‘jugaadu’ and ‘informal’ adaptation is, in fact, the work of surplus: systems of care, trust, and improvisation that go beyond dominant governance frameworks. It is sustained in small acts: how women in Kanpur reclaim discarded flowers to disrupt cycles of decay, how the Koli community restores sewage nallahs to living creeks, how the Kadar tribe retrieves honey without harming ecosystems. These acts alone do not save the world. But they show us that it is still alive. They centre reparation, relationality, collective memory, and alternative forms of knowledge that systems of domination have overlooked or dismissed. They demand that climate interventions nurture the erotic capacities already alive in our households, our communities, and our economies.

What appears to be a waste of our time and resources, then, may be the very substance of survival. Perhaps it is in those moments deemed ‘unproductive’ – the frustrating conversations, the exhausting breakdowns, the hours spent doing nothing – that the very possibility of productivity is sustained. It is often through difference, through moments of tension, dissonance, even conflict, that a deeper understanding is seeded. This process requires that we hold space for multiple ways of seeing, always in relation to context. In a world that asks us to choose between binaries, we must find ways to bridge them.

We must also reckon with climate’s own agency: its capacity to live and persevere, not simply be preserved in stasis. The transition to a more malleable climate governance framework raises profound questions about what type of climate is desirable, who holds the power to decide that, how competing interests and values are reconciled, and whether this shift will democratise climate action or entrench new hegemonies of control. Yet, this also presents an opportunity to rethink governance itself: as an effort that goes beyond merely ‘managing’ populations or ‘mitigating’ consequences to being an active process of negotiation, integration, and creativity. This shift, though contentious, can offer pathways to new security systems or economic imperatives, while also challenging us to question the very metrics by which we judge progress. In this context, our politics must embrace change: where contradictions don’t diminish us, but dare us to uncover more expansive, inclusive, radical, even whimsical forms of climate action.

Systems of control are collapsing in the wake of climate change because they are anchored in rigid, binaristic structures that fail to respond to the fluid and urgent demands of a changing world. In these cracks of collapsing governance, our bodies are the seeds from which alternate truths take root, from which new worlds can grow.

This compels us to consider: the wind will carry us all, but what kind of a world will it carry us from?

Readings

Cover image: A still from the film The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), dir. Abbas Kiarostami

anvita walia / About Author
anvita is a researcher. she studies world-weaving as a relational and political act. she is drawn to liminality, and delights in small details.
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